Roundup: Media's Take

E.J. Dionne: Dragging down the Democrats

There's the brand, and then there's the product. At the moment, the Democratic brand is pretty good while the Republican brand is badly scarred. But when it comes to product, Democrats still have a lot of development work to do. As they toil away, Republicans will be working just as hard to soil the Democratic name. It's been clear for months that large majorities of Americans have given up on the Republicans. They've turned decisively against President Bush and, in principle, want

Simon Kennedy and Mark Drajem: Beggar-Thy-Neighbor Protectionism Looms

Deal or no deal, the latest round of global trade talks may be the last of its kind. Officials from the U.S., the European Union, India and Brazil meet this week to try to advance the faltering Doha round of negotiations. The talks are part of a six-decade push to liberalize trade that is yielding diminishing returns as technology and an increasingly integrated global economy render it less relevant. ``I don't want to be apocalyptic about the world trading system, bu

Froma Harrop: A Bad Breed of Brazen Republicans

Republicans hardly have a lock on corruption in Washington, but they do seem to hold the patent on an especially brazen breed of dodgy politician. This is the official who combines devious dealing with abusive behavior. Alaska Rep. Don Young seems to fit the mold, as did former California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now doing jail time for bribery, fraud and tax evasion. Sellers of the public interest tend to be amiable fellows, who, upon sensing they've gone too far, ba

Patricia Cohen: An Unexpected Odd Couple ... Free Markets and Freedom

When President Bush declared last week that political openness naturally accompanied economic openness, his counterparts in Beijing and Moscow were not the only ones to object. Liberal and conservative intellectuals, even once ardent supporters, have backed away from the century-old theory that democracy and capitalism, like Paris Hilton and paparazzi, need each other to survive. From China, where astounding economic growth persists despite Communist Party rule, to Russia, where Pre

Kenneth D. Ackerman: Another J. Edgar Hoover?

[Kenneth D. Ackerman is author of "Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties."] WHAT created J. Edgar Hoover? He reigned with an iron fist as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation fo

Polly Toynbee: We need a rebellion against a press

Tony Blair was dead right about the British media. It's a fleet of runaway JCB diggers without driver or brakes, beyond accountability or control even by those who nominally run them. Needless to say, with almost one voice the media turned the blame back on Blair: who was this spin maestro to throw stones? They have a point, up to a point. But there was no nanosecond's pause for reflection, not a moment for self-doubt. Blair's enemies of right and left, current and former editors, used ev

Jonathan Freedland: Bush's amazing achievement

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced

Michael Gerson: Two Parties Fleeing the Center

Among the presidential candidates, Bushism is under siege. So is Clintonism. And there is no reason to celebrate the downfall of either. The immigration debate is a reminder to the memory-impaired that President Bush ran and won in 2000 as "a different kind of Republican" -- meaning the kind that isn't libertarian or nativist. Bush was orthodox on tax cuts and moral values. But from the earliest days of the nomination contest, he set out policies -- a federal role in impro

Melonyce McAfee: How do they choose the holiest sites in Islam?

[Melonyce McAfee is a Slate copy editor.] The Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, was bombed for the second time in more than a year on Wednesday, its minarets reduced to rubble. News reports described the mosque as one of the four most-revered Shiite shrines in Iraq. How do the holiest sites in Islam get ranked? According to their historical and spiritual importance within a sect or region. There is a hadith (one of the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed)

Elizabeth Drew: Nostalgia for Nixon?

Anger and frustration with the president have produced an unusual turn of late. Numerous people have been moved to remark, "I'm beginning to miss Nixon," or, "I wish we could have Nixon back" -- this usually followed by, "He was so progressive on domestic policy." The nostalgists rightly see Richard Nixon as having been far more intelligent and thoughtful than George W. Bush; Nixon was indeed very smart, though no intellectual. Actually, he hated intell

P. David Hornik: Boycotting the Jews in Britain

[P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.] BBC reporter Alan Johnston has been held since March 26 by a terrorist group in Gaza, where he had been the last international journalist to keep living and working. He appeared last Thursday in a video wearing an orange sweatshirt

Robert McFarlane: Iraq looking more and more like Vietnam in 1968

[Mr. McFarlane, a former Marine officer, served as National Security Adviser to President Reagan.] Thirty-nine years ago, half way through my second tour in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive was launched by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, who were soundly defeated on the battlefield. Two measures of that battle -- both relevant to the situation in Iraq today -- stand out for me. The first relates to an important lesson U.S. forces had learned after three years of conflict: the vital

Simon Jenkins: This Russian risk could yet dwarf our blunder on Iraq

Will history tell us we were fools? We worried about the wrong war and made the wrong enemies. In the first decade of the 21st century the leaders of America and Britain allowed themselves to be distracted by a few Islamist bombers and took easy refuge in the politics of fear. They concocted a "war on terror" and went off to fight little nations that offered quick wins. Meanwhile these leaders neglected the great strategic challenge of the aftermath of cold war: the fate o

Sidney Blumenthal: Libby lied, troops died

The conviction of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, on criminal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury brings only a partial conclusion to the sordid political tragedy that is the Bush presidency. Yet the judgment on this matter goes to the heart of the administration. The means and the ends of Bush's White House have received a verdict from the bar of justice. Foreign policy was and is the principal way of consolidating u

John Tierney: Rachel Carson's bad science

For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it. If students are going to read “Silent Spring” in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled “Chemicals and Pests.” It was a review of “Silent Spring” in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldw

Robert Dreyfuss: The Pentagon's Blank Check

[Robert Dreyfuss, an independent journalist in the Washington, D.C. area and Rolling Stone magazine's national security correspondent, is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He writes frequently for Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Washington Monthly. His web site is RobertDreyfuss.com.

Michael I. Krauss & J. Peter Pham: The U.S. should move its embassy in Israel to the capital of Israel

Forty years ago this week, on the third day of the Six-Day War, Israel entered the Old City of Jerusalem. Returning to the Western Wall from which he and all other Jews had, in blatant violation of the terms of the 1949 armistice, been excluded by Jordanian occupiers, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a succinct announcement that reflected the weight of millennial hopes and yearnings: “The Israel Defense Forces have liberated Jerusalem. We have reunited the torn city, the capital of Israel. We h

James P. Pinkerton: The Republican insiders’ guide to ethnic manipulation

[James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday and a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. ] Hidden away, secreted in the dusty stacks of the Machiavellian Library, is the definitive how-to guide, Winning Through Ethnic Manipulation. Observing the immigration and affirmative-action policies favored by the current administration, it’s one book that I am sure George W. Bush—or at least Karl Rove—has read. Start with the chapter entitled “Divide and Conq

Heather Rogers: Thomas Edison's still relevant

[Heather Rogers is a filmmaker and the author of “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.”] When Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced his vision of development in New York City over the next 25 years, he highlighted a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent. To anyone who has studied the history of power consumption in the United States, his proposal sounded a curious echo. New York, after all, was home to one of the country’s first central power stations, bui

Paul Street: Do Edwards and Obama Really Believe the Myth of Post WW II Benevolence?

[Veteran radical historian, journalist, and speaker Paul Street (paulstreet99@ yahoo.com) is an anti-centrist political commentator located in Iowa City. Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) and The Empire and Inequality Report. Street's next